Network service discovery , selection , and brokerage

The next generation Internet is expected to cope with new challenges to support a wide spectrum of network applications with highly diverse requirements due to the coexisting heterogeneous network environment. One of the challenges to achieve this objective lies in enabling network domain collaboration and network application interaction without exposing the internal structure and implementation details of each domain, where network virtualization will play a pivotal role in allowing a large number of service providers to offer various network services upon shared network infrastructure. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) [39] offers an effective architectural principle for heterogeneous system integration and provides a promising approach to support network virtualization, which can be applied in network service discovery, selection, and brokerage for the special requirements of future Internet. Due to the heterogeneity of network systems in ubiquitous and pervasive computing environments, network service discovery, selection, and brokerage face one of the main challenges to specify network demands of various applications. A key to solve this problem lies in flexible and effective interactions among the heterogeneous networks, various implementations and ubiquitous architectures with scalable information update, network-platform-independent methods, multi-attribute decision-making techniques, etc.